The “Airplane!” school of chock-full-of-jokes conceptual parody, with its fourth-wall-smashing stupido-smart goofiness, had a pretty impressive run.
It ruled for several decades, spawning everything from the “Airplane!” creators’ own “Naked Gun” franchise — to me, the media-age Marx Brothers-worthy masterpiece of the form — to the Wayans brothers’ “Scary Movie” franchise to several dozen comedies, from “Hot Shots!” to “National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon 1” to “Not Another Teen Movie,” that skewered genre after genre after genre with the puckish satiric glee that most of them deserved.
But the “Airplane!” school didn’t stick around long enough to mount a full-scale comic attack on the superhero movie.
Which is too bad, since it could have been stupendous.
What comic-book films, with their authoritarian heroism and CGI bombast, just about cry out for is a parody that’s massively scaled in its high-flying mockery.A movie like “Thunder Force,” on the other hand, would like to skewer the genre,
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